Legal concerns of Wikimedia Europe

Dimi Dimitrov, Policy Director for Wikimedia Europe,¹ discusses their legal concerns with Radio Active Magazine regular Spencer Graves. This conversation focuses especially on actions considered and enacted by the European parliament in Brussels.

Dimi works to ensure that changes European law protect and advance the ability of Wikimedians to support Wikipedia’s Prime Objective to build “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”²

A relatively recent major change in this area was the European “Digital Services Act” adopted in 2022. It addresses illegal content, transparent advertising and disinformation.³ The latter seems to be a major issue in contributing to the rise of political polarization and violence internationally as exemplified in the attack on the US Capitol January 6, 2021,⁴ and the similar attack on the  Brazilian Congress in 2023.⁵

Much of the rest of the world, including the US, might benefit from studying the Digital Services Act and its impact. One feature that act copied from US law was “notice and takedown” procedures of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): Web sites must (a) provide users with a way to complain about, e.g., copyright infringement and (b) are required to either take down the content that allegedly infringes or be prepared to defend in court that their content does not violate copyright law.⁶

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen notes that for-profit Internet companies tune their algorithms to maximize their profits. That increases political polarization and violence, “because the shortest path to a click is anger or hate.”⁷ This is a much bigger problem outside the US,⁸ including in the Europe Union, which has 24 official languages.⁹ By comparison, roughly three quarters of the US population speak only English at home.¹⁰

A key distinction for Dimi is whether the content that a platform shows you is the same for all users or is adjusted based on what it knows about you. What you see from companies like Google, Facebook, or X is curated based on what the company knows about you, e.g., your geographic location or history on the Internet. Few people realize that what others see is different. Those differences often drive conflict.

The Wikimedia Foundation is virtually unique among major Internet organizations in that it shows the same content to everyone. Almost anyone can change almost anything on Wikipedia anonymously. What stays tends to be written from a neutral point of view citing credible sources. People may get angry, but they routinely collaborate to produce text that nearly everyone can more or less live with.¹¹ That’s very different from companies like Google, Facebook or X, where few people are aware that their opposition sees something different. That, in turn, can fuel political polarization and violence, with each side believing they are right and the others wrong.¹²

Dimi mentioned problems with content moderation in small Wikipedias like the Bulgarian language Wikipedia. He said someone from Poland helps without really understanding the Bulgarian language. This cannot work for everything. However, many edits are obvious vandalism, like replacing the photograph of a politician with that of a chicken: You don’t need to be fluent in Bulgarian to identify that as likely vandalism and revert it.

Dimi said there are roughly 20 very large Internet organizations in the world today. The Wikimedia Foundation is unique in multiple ways.

• It’s non-profit. The others are all for profit.
• It shows the same content to everyone. The others collect lots of data about users and tailors what they show to elicit the strongest response from users, because that’s how they make money. Since anger and hate tend to be most profitable, that threatens world peace and democracy everywhere.
• It collects as little data as possible on its users. Almost anyone can change almost anything on Wikipedia even without creating an account with Wikipedia. People can “watch” articles on Wikipedia. For that, they need to create an account and provide an email address. However, the user name can be fictitious. That protects users, because if someone, e.g., a government official wants the names of everyone who edited a Wikipedia article, they can get a list of all the IP addresses of anonymous users and user names of those who have accounts. However, they cannot get the real names of users who have created an account with a fictitious name.

Dimi is native Bulgarian and a graduate of the University of Vienna, Austria. He works today in Brussels, Belgium.¹³

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1. The article on “Wikimedia Europe” in Meta.Wikipedia.org (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Europe), accessed 2024-10-18.

2. Wikipedia, “Wikipedia:Prime objective” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Prime_objective).

3. Wikipedia, “Digital Services Act” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act).

4. Wikipedia, “January 6 United States Capitol attack” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack).

5. Wikipedia, “2023 Brazilian Congress attack” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Brazilian_Congress_attack).

6. Wikipedia, “Digital Millennium Copyright Act” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act).

7. Wikiversity, “Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen says” (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Facebook_whistleblower_Frances_Haugen_says).

8. Wikiversity, “How psychological and interpersonal processes are influenced by human-computer interactions” (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/How_psychological_and_interpersonal_processes_are_influenced_by_human-computer_interactions).

9. Wikipedia, “European Union” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union).

10. Wikipedia, “United States” section on “Language” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States#Language).

11. Section on “Articles on contentious issues” in the Wikipedia article on, “Reliability of Wikipedia”. Renée DiResta (2024) Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality (PublicAffairs, pp. 331-332) cites research claiming that veracity can be effectively crowdsourced.

12. This is discussed in multiple articles on Wikiversity with “Category:Media reform to improve democracy” (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Category:Media_reform_to_improve_democracy). Also, it is often said that the first casualty of war is truth. The recent increase in political polarization and violence suggests that truth dies long before the first blow is struck in anger. For more on this, see the section on “Media and war” in the Wikiversity article on “Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government” (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Information_is_a_public_good:_Designing_experiments_to_improve_government).

13. “User:Dimi z” in Meta.Wikimedia.org (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dimi_z).

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